The Five Senses, Touch

The series of paintings illustrating the Five Senses reveals a clearly Baroque sensibility, evident in the artist’s capacity to capture the psychology of his sitters, the portrait’s realism resulting from the artist’s skill in capturing the spontaneity of a fleeting moment. Gonzales Coques painted two other series of paintings devoted to the five senses, of which one is currently in the National Gallery, London. In the series in the Brukenthal Art Gallery, the painter emphasizes the psychological states of his sitters, apparently common people, from the lower middle class. In this series, the attributes of the senses only serve as pretexts, to include in the composition a number of static elements (tables laden with food, musical notes, smoking paraphernalia, medical instruments, and an easel). The painting that carries the greatest psychological charge in this series is Touch, because the experience rendered is pain, and its attribute is not an object, as in the other paintings, but a wound. Contemplating this picture will surely induce a state of empathy with the man depicted, facilitated by the frontal presentation of the sitter, who looks us straight in the eye, with dolorous eyes, that crave our compassion. ©Dana Roxana Hrib, European Art Gallery Guidebook, Second edition, Sibiu 2011.